Political Order and Political Decay (48 page)

But African ethnic groups are largely a modern phenomenon, created either in the colonial period or consolidated in postcolonial times. A classic segmentary lineage—a tribe, speaking anthropologically—is a group that traces common ancestry to a progenitor who may be two, three, or more generations distant. The system is held together by a very specific set of beliefs about the power of dead ancestors and unborn descendants to affect the fortunes of the living. As described in E. E. Evans-Pritchard's classic study of the Nuer in South Sudan, these lineages are scalable depending on how many generations back one chooses an ancestor. For most day-to-day purposes, the relevant ancestor is very proximate and the kin group correspondingly very small.

Modern ethnic groups, by contrast, encompass hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. They may claim descent from a common ancestor, as the Roman tribes claimed descent from Romulus, but that ancestor is so distant as to be more a matter of myth and fabulism than a real person. The contemporary African sense of ethnic identity was, as we will see in the following chapter, often cultivated by the colonial authorities, who believed that certain groups were more “martial” and therefore suitable as recruits for the military, or else who wanted to play one group against another in order to make them more tractable. Today, one of the main functions of ethnic identity is to act as a signaling device in the clientelistic division of state resources: if you are a Kikuyu and can elect a Kikuyu president, you are much more likely to be favored with government jobs, public works projects, and the like.

PUSHING ON AN OPEN DOOR

There were few strong centralized states in Africa prior to the scramble, and the Europeans did not create any once the continent had been carved up among them by the time of World War I. The reasons for this derive from the characteristics of the second wave of colonialism described above. The interests of European governments were much more strategic than economic; they wanted to make sure that they could protect existing dependencies and prevent new powers from outflanking them. They were much more interested in creating zones of influence or protectorates than ruling indigenous Africans directly, and they did not want to spend a lot of state resources in the process. If these territories yielded economic benefits, so much the better.

The actual extension of colonial authority was thus often driven by actors other than national governments. Among them were local agents who, without the knowledge or approval of their home ministries, expanded their country's claims; settlers in existing colonies who demanded protection and new opportunities to acquire land; the commercial interests of various local traders and chartered companies which, if not of vital economic interest to their home governments, nonetheless constituted powerful lobbies; and missionaries, who saw Africa as ripe for conversion and cultural conquest.

It is said that the British Empire was created in a fit of absentmindedness; this was in fact true not just of that empire but also of those of many other Europeans. Thus, for example, Afrique Occidentale Française, one of the two large divisions of the French Empire in Africa, was created by a group of French officers who trekked into the upper Niger valley and ultimately into Chad in disregard of orders from Paris. French traders lobbied for the appointment of General Louis Faidherbe to be governor of Senegal and to push up the Senegal River valley to reduce tribute they owed to African chiefs there. The Congo Free State was the creation not of the Belgian government but of King Leopold II, who made this huge territory his personal property and whose debts Belgium was later forced to assume. British expansion in West Africa actually came about as an accidental by-product of their efforts to suppress the slave trade. Freetown in Sierra Leone had been a naval base and haven for freed slaves; areas surrounding it were progressively annexed to prevent traders from evading customs at the port. Bismarck found few German companies willing to invest in Africa; nonetheless, fear that the German foothold in Tanganyika would threaten lines of communication to India led the British to cement their hold over Uganda, Zanzibar, and other parts of East Africa.
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This mixture of motives for the colonization of Africa resulted in a constant tug-of-war between European groups on the ground that wanted to extend imperial control and deepen investments there, and governments (and the taxpayers standing behind them) who were skeptical of the value of these new African possessions. The colonial powers experienced what today is labeled “mission creep,” which has been the bane of American post–cold war foreign policy: a small intervention, designed to be of limited purpose and duration, creates on-the-ground interests and commitments that then require further interventions to make the whole effort sustainable. For example, the need to suppress terrorists in Afghanistan spills over into Pakistan, generating new requirements to stabilize Pakistan through military and economic aid, and requires logistics bases in Central Asia, which then become bargaining chips in a larger U.S.-Russian relationship. This dynamic leads to ever-expanding involvement without necessarily creating a consensus at home as to the wisdom of undertaking the project in the first place.

In Africa, this logic led to colonialism on the cheap, an effort to maintain influence while failing to invest sufficiently in sustainable political institutions. In Singapore, the British created not just a port where none had existed before but also a crown colony and administrative structure designed to support their interests throughout Southeast Asia. In India, they created a British Indian army and a higher civil service, institutions that were bequeathed to an independent Indian republic in 1947 and still exist. In Africa, by contrast, they created a system of minimal administration that went under the title of “indirect rule.” In so doing they failed to provide postindependence African states with durable political institutions and laid the ground for subsequent state weakness and failure. It is this system to which we turn next.

 

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INDIRECT RULE

Sierra Leone and the crisis of state breakdown; how states can be brutal and weak at the same time; what “indirect rule” was and why it developed; how French direct rule differed and why in the end it proved to be no more successful in implanting modern institutions

During Sierra Leone's horrific descent into civil war during the 1990s, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), led by warlord Foday Sankoh, began the practice of recruiting child soldiers—young boys of twelve or thirteen, or even younger—who would be given marijuana, amphetamines, and cocaine, and forced to kill their parents in front of their friends. These traumatized children, then implicated in the most horrible of crimes, would go on to commit further atrocities, like slicing open the bellies of pregnant women to determine the sex of their children, or amputating the hands of captured soldiers or ordinary civilians so that they would never use them against the RUF in the future. Women would be routinely raped and forced to serve as wives of the child soldiers. In 1999, the RUF launched an assault on Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, known as “Operation No Living Thing,” in which entire neighborhoods were looted and their inhabitants indiscriminately raped and killed.
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How does one explain this level of human degradation? One answer, usually not articulated too openly but often tacitly assumed, is that things were somehow always like this in Africa. The Sierra Leone conflict, portrayed in the popular film
Blood Diamond
, as well as others like the insurgency of the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda, or the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, have reinforced Western notions that Africa is a place of brutality and barbarism. Robert D. Kaplan and others have suggested that in West Africa the veneer of civilization had broken down, and these societies were returning to an older, primordial form of tribalism, only fought with modern weapons.
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This answer reflects a great deal of ignorance about historical Africa, and about tribalism more broadly. Tribally organized societies are orderly: segmentary lineages are a form of political order that both keep the peace and limit power. Very few tribal chiefs or Big Men have the power or authority to tyrannize their fellows; most tribal societies are indeed egalitarian when compared to their state-level counterparts. They have clear rules regulating personal behavior and strict (if informal) methods for enforcing them. Tribal segments often skirmish with one another, but they do not exist in some sort of Hobbesean state of anomic violence of the sort represented by Sierra Leone and Somalia in the 1990s. Nor do they constantly innovate in coming up with new forms of grotesque cruelty.

An alternative explanation of why a country like Sierra Leone came to be racked by horrific violence is colonialism. The history of European colonialism includes systematic and intensive brutality against indigenous populations.
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The practice of hacking off hands and arms as warnings in Sierra Leone that so outraged Western opinion was originally practiced by the Force Publique in Leopold's Belgian Congo: according to one account, “Soldiers in the Congo were told to account for every cartridge fired, so they hacked off and smoked the hands, feet and private parts of their victims. Body parts were presented to commanders in baskets as proof that soldiers had done their work well.”
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While the slave trade had been suppressed, the economies of colonial Africa were highly dependent on different types of coerced labor and economic extraction. Involuntary impressment was also a widespread European practice; all colonies required corvée labor of most men, including work in unbearable and unhealthy conditions that led to the deaths of thousands. Many thousands more were drafted into European armies for service and often died on battlefields very far from home. The British, in prosecuting the Hut tax war in Sierra Leone, hanged ninety-six tribal chiefs whom they blamed for the insurrection.
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European colonial officials often behaved like petty tyrants, dispensing justice (or injustice) arbitrarily with few checks on their power. Consider the following vignette from German-controlled Cameroon, where the “imperial chancellor of the protectorate, Leist, had the wives of Dahomey soldiers whipped in the presence of their husbands, which resulted in December 1893 in a revolt of the soldiers. He had female convicts brought to him from the prison at night for his sexual gratification. He was brought before a disciplinary council and condemned to be transferred to an equivalent post, with a loss of seniority, for ‘an error in the cause of duty.'”
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Indeed, an entire academic discipline devoted to exposing the horrors of European colonialism emerged in the late twentieth century, which sought to explain how contemporary Africa's many problems are rooted in the colonial experience. Many of the newer economic theories tracing poor governance to extractive colonial institutions have joined hands with this earlier school of thought.

There is something wrong, however, with any theory directly connecting a particular colonial practice with a contemporary outcome. In the first place, Sierra Leone is no more typical of contemporary Africa than the Belgian Congo was typical of colonial Africa. Sierra Leone was one of a handful of failed states in a continent of more than fifty sovereign entities, the vast majority of which were far more peacefully governed and stable. Similarly, the Belgian Congo stood out among colonial administrations as particularly brutal and exploitative. The practices of the Force Publique and Belgian companies were exposed by Protestant missionaries and activists like E. D. Morel seeking to protect ordinary Congolese from their depredations. Public opinion back in Europe eventually forced the Belgian government to clamp down on Leopold's private enterprise. The vast majority of colonial governments, especially as they began to approach independence, used significantly lower levels of coercion.

There were in fact large continuities between the colonial state and the states that emerged after Africa's independence, but that continuity was different from inheritance of one particular abhorrent practice. Brutality was part of the picture, but the primary colonial legacy was handing down weak states that did not have the power or authority to compel obedience on the part of their populations. While the outward show of postindependence African presidencies was enormous, it masked an underlying inability of the state to penetrate and shape society. The horrors of Sierra Leone—and of Liberia, Somalia, and the Congo—represented an extreme version of state weakness, where the postindependence state collapsed completely. The vacuum was filled not by traditional African society but by a half-modernized hybrid of deracinated young men who organized themselves to take advantage of the global economy and exploit natural resource rents from diamonds and other commodities.

It might seem contradictory to say that a state can be brutal and weak at the same time. Don't strong states kill, jail, and torture their opponents? But the two in fact go together. All states concentrate and use power—that is, the ability to violently coerce people—but successful states rely more heavily on authority, that is, voluntary compliance with the state's wishes based on a broad belief in the government's legitimacy. In peaceful liberal democracies, the fist is usually hidden behind layered gloves of law, custom, and norms. States that make heavy use of overt coercion and brutality often do so because they cannot exercise proper authority. They have what Michael Mann labels “despotic power” but not “infrastructural power” to penetrate and shape society.
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This was true of both the colonial African state and the independent countries that emerged after the end of colonial rule.
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The reality of the colonial state was not a transplanted absolutist regime imposed by the Europeans but rather “indirect rule,” a policy that had been practiced since the Indian Rebellion of 1858 but was systematically articulated for the first time by Lord Frederick Lugard, the British governor of, among other places, Northern Nigeria (from 1900 to 1906) and Hong Kong (from 1907 to 1912). Lugard's experience in Africa taught him that Britain did not remotely have either the resources or the personnel to govern its huge African domains directly, in the manner in which it governed the small city-state of Hong Kong. In writings like
The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa
, he asserted that efforts to impose European law and institutions on unwilling African subjects were counterproductive, and that indigenous peoples were better and more justly governed using their own customary practices. This led to a regime, first put into place among the Muslim emirates in Northern Nigeria, whereby administration was put into the hands of local chiefs carefully selected by the British and presided over by a skeletal hierarchy of white officials led by a district officer or commissioner.
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